I. Field
The present invention relates generally to communication, and more specifically to spatial processing for data transmission in a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) communication system.
II. Background
A MIMO system employs multiple (NT) transmit antennas at a transmitting entity and multiple (NR) receive antennas at a receiving entity for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the NT transmit antennas and NR receive antennas may be decomposed into NS spatial channels, where NS≦min {NT, NR}. The NS spatial channels may be used to transmit data in parallel to achieve higher throughput and/or redundantly to achieve greater reliability.
Each spatial channel may experience various deleterious channel conditions such as, e.g., fading, multipath, and interference effects. The NS spatial channels may also experience different channel conditions and may achieve different signal-to-noise-and-interference ratios (SNRs). The SNR of each spatial channel determines its transmission capacity, which is typically quantified by a particular data rate that may be reliably transmitted on the spatial channel. For a time variant wireless channel, the channel conditions change over time and the SNR of each spatial channel also changes over time.
To improve performance, the MIMO system may utilize some form of feedback whereby the receiving entity evaluates the spatial channels and provides feedback information indicating the channel condition or the transmission capacity of each spatial channel. The transmitting entity may then adjust the data transmission on each spatial channel based on the feedback information. However, this feedback information may not be available for various reasons. For example, the system may not support feedback transmission from the receiving entity, or the wireless channel may change more rapidly than the rate at which the receiving entity can estimate the wireless channel and/or send back the feedback information. In any case, if the transmitting entity does not know the channel condition, then it may need to transmit data at a low rate so that the data transmission can be reliably decoded by the receiving entity even with the worst-case channel condition. The performance of such a system would be dictated by the expected worst-case channel condition, which is highly undesirable.
To improve performance (e.g., when feedback information is not available), the transmitting entity may perform spatial processing such that the data transmission does not observe the worst-case channel condition for an extended period of time, as described below. A higher data rate may then be used for the data transmission. However, this spatial processing represents additional complexity for both the transmitting and receiving entities.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently perform spatial processing to improve performance in a MIMO system.